Baština (Jan 2017)
Importance of story and story-telling (structural diphone as semantic layer of the novel Petruša and Miluša by Petar Sarić)
Abstract
Novels by Petar Sarić have not been given equal attention by the literary public which is predominantly due to their unequal artistic quality. Unlike his novel The Master is Coming Tomorrow or Sara, the novel Petruša and Miluša (1990), despite the fact that it cannot be considered as Sarić's best creation, is distinguished by a specific structure and the author's choice to, through two voices, two stories of his heroines, tell us the third one - the meta story, which has an auto-referential utterance as it is forced to be a special layer of the novel. Conceptualized doubly - as a story with two ends, for it is told from the two angles - Sarić's story also has double outcome: on one side, an ancient past, events and destinies of heroes are created by their own story which 'grows' as the story progresses, while, on the other side, the very story forces itself to be the subject of story-telling. Hence Sarić's story is by nature like Scheherazade story giving us an illusion of prolonging the end, as there is no its closure. The magic of story-telling is hidden in its continuity and prolonging of the end. Importance of such stories lies in the fact that a 'grain of truth', is hidden inside them, that is, it presents , just as Andrić claimed, 'real history of manhood' (Who am I? Where do I come from?), and even its 'sense' (Where am I to go to?).
